Archive for March, 2008

Financial panic has hit households across the country, as parents on budgets try to navigate the run up in food prices, gas prices, and health care costs.

According to The Economist, in the last 12 months, there has been a 62% increase in the price of food, making everything from milk to baby formula to bread more expensive for mothers across the country. And according to the Wall Street Journal (and your local gas station), we are now getting stung by gas prices, as oil hits record highs.

And despite our best efforts to conserve gas, we find ourselves in the car, because our children are sick. Our countless appointments with pediatricians, specialists, allergists, and speach therapists are followed by trips to the pharmacy to purchase more prescriptions for our children who are quickly earning the title, “Generation Rx”. As our budgets get squeezed by all of these factors, we find our children overmedicated, undernourished and sick, with health care costs also taking their toll on our family budgets.

Yet at the same time, we watch as our government allocates $600 billion to the Pentagon for war efforts and only $2.4 billion to the FDA “to protect the health of the American public”. That translates into the FDA receiving only two days worth of Pentagon spending to serve as its budget for the entire year. It therefore comes as no surprise that, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, that a November 2007 FDA report states that “American lives are at risk” because the FDA lacks resources and “can no longer ensure the safety of the food supply”. Two days worth of military spending to ensure that the food that we are feeding our children and the medications with which we are injecting our babies are not going to put them at risk for health conditions later in life.

As parents, we watch as the government finds resources to fight wars, bailout banks and subsidize corn based ethanol, knowing that these resources are being financed by a future debt and taxpayer burden that our children will never be able to repay.

And in the 130 million American households across the country, as we struggle to cope with the sudden inflationary pressures that appear to result from our goverment’s allocation of taxpayer resources, the Centers for Disease Control now reports that one in three American children has diabetes, one in three is obese and one in every three American children has allergies, autism, ADHD or asthma.